With Georg Baselitz’s Final Show, in Venice, a Provocateur Ends Softly

Six days after Georg Baselitz died, his long-time dealer Thaddeus Ropac opened an exhibition in Venice this week, and the artist has accepted that it will be his last.

“Eroi d’Oro” at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in San Giorgio Maggiore“ (“The Golden Hero”) brings together the last paintings of Baselitz’s life. He died in April at the age of 88, and in a pre-recorded video for this exhibition, he did not hesitate to refer to these works as “my last paintings.” He said he hoped these were a “summary” of everything he had done.

when art news When Baselitz spoke to him just days before his death, he was more direct. “I have a long biography to look back on,” he said. “I have painted an incredible number of paintings for over 60 years. Now that my painting activity is more or less coming to an end, I think I should come to some kind of conclusion.”

It was a rare final decision for an artist whose reputation has been built on rejecting good taste and what is usually considered fashionable. From the scandal of his early figurative works in the 1960s, to the upside-down paintings that became his signature, to the wooden figures displayed at the 1980 Venice Biennale that looked like broken monuments in homage, his practice has been defined by subversion. But what Baselitz hopes will be his last show will be more of a continuation of his career than another controversial show.

The paintings are massive, almost architectural in scale, and covered with golden ground. On this luminous surface, Baselitz painted thin, ink-like figures, either himself or his wife Elke, lying horizontally as if viewed from above. The body floats in an indeterminate space, a universe that is both intimate and bizarre.

When I spoke to Baselitz, he was incredibly precise about gold’s movements. “Gold absorbs space, shadow and spatiality,” he said. “The most important thing is, just a painting, like on a piece of paper, a nude…as close as I can get.”

This idea of ​​subtraction rather than addition runs throughout the series. The body was reduced to a thin black line. They become ephemeral.

Baselitz rarely used these gold grounds, associating them with Fayum mummy portraits, Sienese altarpieces, and Byzantine icons, all of which depicted the dead. “The effect of these images is that the portrait exists without space or shadow,” he said.

The French art historian Eric Darragon, who knew the artist well, told me that the golden background draws heavily on the visual authority of 14th- and 15th-century Sienese painters such as Duccio, Simone Martini, and Fra Angelico, as well as the German painter Stefan Lochner, who worked in the International Gothic style. These artists used gold to suggest sacred space, eternity, and spiritual significance. Daragon believes that Baselitz adopted this familiar visual language but eliminated its religious function. In turn, it becomes what Daragon describes as a “cold, unambiguous surface” that “consecrates nothing.”

As a result, he told me that “Eroi d’Oro” is a contradiction in terms that it is an ending but still behaves like a beginning. “After 60 years of intense activity, Baselitz feels a sense of accomplishment,” Daragon said, but he explained that the idea of ​​closure was unstable. The defining condition of the artist is “his constant need to start over, to venture into the unknown at all risks.”

I asked Baselitz how he hopes this exhibition will shape or challenge the way his work is ultimately understood. “I’m not responsible for what happened,” he said. “My communications with the public have been very sparse and restrained. It’s clear that this is not a drama and this is not a mythological event.”

If he had reservations, it was probably out of caution. His comments in a 2013 interview with a German magazine Der Spiegel The matter about the female painter put him in a difficult position. He believed that women could not make good painters, so he was favored by the art world. In 2021 interview Art Network Newshe said his words “were taken out of context, [caused] Misunderstand. ” He added that he was strongly opposed to the idea of ​​judging art by identity categories. “I find it very silly to classify art according to quotas: male, female, black, white… To me, art can only be good or bad,” he added.

I asked him what he thought of his infamous comments and whether his stance had changed. “This is a big provocation,” he replied without elaborating.

So now that he’s dead, where does Baselitz’s legacy fit into the history of contemporary art?

“Baselitz doesn’t believe that history is simply additive,” Daragon told me. “For a work to appear, he believed that everything must be questioned. Furthermore, he did regard ‘zero’ as an existential symbol that defined him, but this requirement, far from being a blank slate, suggested, on the contrary, the rediscovery of the past – a past that had been ignored or even forgotten.”

Daragon adds that Baselitz “was different from the mainstream of his time.”